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JP - in Liverpool, the most vulnerable are at risk of losing their homes. 

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JP - in Liverpool, the most vulnerable are at risk of losing their homes. 

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Having a place you can call home is fundamental to a civilised society. But in Liverpool, 840 households could now lose the roof over their heads through no fault of their own.

They will all be affected by the new, lower benefit cap of £20,000 being introduced from 7 November. This follows a tsunami of regressive changes to the benefits system since 2010, including the bedroom tax, the freezing of benefit rates and cuts to equivalent working tax credits for those on universal credit. Contrary to popular belief, many households being hit already have someone in work.

Our analysis shows the new benefits cap amounts to a total weekly cut of £37,200 to housing benefit payments in the city. It means an average reduction in rent contributions of £44 a household a week.

We believe this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back and will tip some families over the edge - including 2,800 children.

We can support our residents for a short time through discretionary housing payments, though most of that is already being used up by applications from people hit by the bedroom tax.

We expect arrears will mount up leading to evictions. We will then need to rehouse the families in temporary accommodation at a cost to the council of about £400 a week - nine times more than the cut to their benefit.

This could mean uprooting families already under pressure, and moving them to a different part of the city away from much-needed support networks, their schools and their wider families.

Aside from the devastating social consequences and stress, in financial terms all this policy is doing is shifting the cost from the government over to the council, housing associations and our other local partners. This at the same time as we're facing huge cuts to our budgets: £90m alone in the case of Liverpool city council over the next three years.

At the moment we're spending almost £7m a year shielding households from the full impact of cuts to council tax benefit, using our own funds to top up the discretionary housing payments pot and helping people in crisis pay for food, fuel, clothing and essential white goods. The savings we need to find over the next three years is going make it much harder for us to respond to families affected by this.

There is something seriously wrong when, in the name of austerity, the most vulnerable face the prospect of losing their homes.
Councillor Jane Corbett is cabinet member for fairness, social inclusion and equalities at Liverpool city council Sign up for your free Guardian Housing network newsletter with news and analysis sent direct to you on the last Friday of the month. Follow us:@GuardianHousing Topics

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In Liverpool, 840 families risk losing their homes because of benefits cuts

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Having a place you can call home is fundamental to a civilised society. But in Liverpool, 840 households could now lose the roof over their heads through no fault of their own. They will all be affected by the new, lower benefit cap of £20,000 being introduced from 7 November.

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Private Landlords get £9.3bn in Housing Benefits

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Private Landlords get £9.3bn in Housing Benefits

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Raising some important questions about welfare and "scrounging"

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Taxpayers handed over £9.3bn in housing benefit to Britain's private landlords last year, nearly double the amount paid 10 years ago, according to a new report.

The number of households receiving housing benefit to pay rent to private landlords has risen 42% since 2008, the National Housing Federation, which represents the non-profit housing sector, has found.

The NHF calculated that if all those housed in the private rented sector lived in affordable housing, taxpayers would save £1.5bn a year. David Orr, the federation's chief executive, said: "It is madness to spend £9bn of taxpayers' money lining the pockets of private landlords, rather than investing in affordable homes.

"Housing associations want to build the homes the nation needs. By loosening restrictions on existing funding, the government can free up housing associations to build more affordable housing at better value to the taxpayer and directly address the housing crisis."

The number of housing benefit recipients in the private rented sector has risen from just over a million in 2008 to almost 1.5 million in February this year.

Housing benefit is paid to households that cannot afford to meet their rental costs and have enough left over for essentials such as food, clothes, heating and lighting. Almost half the households in the private rented sector that receive housing benefit are in work, but not earning enough to cover the rent and living expenses.

In a sign of how pay has failed to keep pace with the cost of living, in 2008 only a quarter of the private renters in receipt of housing benefit were in work.

According to the NHF's research, housing benefit claims in the private rented sector are much higher than in the non-profit housing sector, with on average about £1,000 extra being spent to keep roofs over the heads of private renters - rising to £3,300 a year in London.

Since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008, the proportion of housing benefit recipients paying private rents has risen from one in four, to almost one in three.

The NHF also noted a rise in the proportion of middle-income households forced to turn to the benefits system. "Specifically, the strongest increase in housing benefit claimants has been among households with net incomes between £20,000 and £28,000 per year, rising from 11% in 2008/09 to 19% in 2014/15," the report stated.

A government spokesman said it had taken action to reduce the private rental sector housing benefit bill. "The reality is we have taken action to bring the housing benefit bill under control, and since 2012 the amount going to private sector landlords has actually been falling - something which the National Housing Federation fails to recognise," he said.

"We are also committed to building the homes this country needs and investing £8bn to build 400,000 more affordable homes."

Teresa Pearce MP, Labour's shadow minister for housing and planning, said: "The government has made a number of attempts to reduce the housing benefit bill but they have been targeted at capping and penalising the claimants rather than spending on the root cause, which is a chronic lack of social housing.

"The private rented sector has become the only option for the ever growing number of families with nowhere to call home, but it's expensive and insecure. This is not just a problem with the housing benefit system but with the whole of this government's housing policy which only wants to help those who can afford to buy."
Topics

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Private landlords get £9.3bn in housing benefit from taxpayer, says report

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Taxpayers handed over £9.3bn in housing benefit to Britain's private landlords last year, nearly double the amount paid 10 years ago, according to a new report. The number of households receiving housing benefit to pay rent to private landlords has risen 42% since 2008, the National Housing Federation, which represents the non-profit housing sector, has found.

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Channel 4 News March 2015

Housing Shortages in the UK
First half of the video: Inequalities, families being evictedfrom their homes.
Second half of the video: debate about the cause of housing shortages

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A look at the problem of housing shortages, especially caued by property developers. With film director Ken Loach versus Conservative John Redwood. Recorded from Channel 4 News, 17 March 2015.

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A selection of articles on social housing from the guardian newspaper

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MPs urge government to release cash for removal of Grenfell-style cladding

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Enfield's response to social housing need. Important video: (Ruth Patrick)

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Enfield's response to social housing need. Important video: (Ruth Patrick)

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Christina is at breaking point. The thing is, so are the people she's asking for help.

Christina and her three kids have nowhere to stay. Their private landlord chucked them out after she fell behind on the rent, poleaxed by the coalition's cap on welfare benefits. When they pitched up at Enfield council's homelessness centre last night, officers sent them to a hostel. Her appointment this morning will decide where the family sleeps tonight.

The meeting's here, at John Wilkes House - although the invocation of that radical wit does nothing for a low-slung office block plonked next to a branch of Asda and a pound shop. This is where residents of the north London borough of Enfield pitch up when their housing benefits haven't arrived. It's also where they come if they're made homeless.

All those headlines about runaway prices and impossible rents: John Wilkes House is where you see the human fallout. A meltdown happens daily here: one that's forced the council to experiment with a string of new, unusual and highly risky interventions in its housing market. Many of its policies are untried. Some are radical enough to startle even the experts.

Just a few miles away from Westminster, Enfield's local politicians are making a series of gambles that parliament's big beasts wouldn't dare try. They come with serious political and economic risk. But if even some of the things being tried by Enfield work out, they might help not only cases such as Christina's, but also point to some radical solutions to Britain's housing crisis.

But first, see what an outer London borough is up against.

This morning, Christina's brought along her eldest, Si. "I've been crying from the moment I wake up, and trying to hide it from the kids," she says. "I didn't want the kids to be disappointed in me. I didn't want them to be taken away from me." She broke down during a recent school run, she says, "in front of about 100 other parents".

Si turns 11 in four days. What would he like for his birthday? "WWE!" Seeing my confusion, he translates into old-speak. "Wrestling!" Small hands bounce on the ripped knees of his jogging bottoms.

First, the pair must wait. Waiting is built into the architecture of John Wilkes. It begins outside the office, with a long see-through shelter, where a queue forms long before opening time. The most desperate carry neon-pink suitcases, bulging Lidl carrier bags, plump binliners: the sum of their lives which, in the glare of morning, resembles nothing so much as the leavings outside a charity shop.

At 9am, the line pours past the security guards and into the reception - and the waiting begins all over again, in front of a big screen that, at one point, notes the average time to be seen is 84 minutes.

Inside, everyone hears everyone else's business: the elaborate ringtones, the kids shouted at to pipe down, the official interrogations.

"You not got any friends who can help?"

"Why don't you have no money?"

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John Wilkes House is also under pressure from austerity. On the day of this report, 10 staff were given notice of redundancy. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

They hear the answers, too. Wimbledon thwacks away on the reception telly, but no one watches.

At first, the balance of power seems starkly cliched: here gather the supplicants desperate for shelter; behind those glass partitions sit the local authority representatives deciding their fate.

But a day here reveals a council at the limit of its abilities and a workforce at the end of its tether. Those on the front desk each see about 50 people in need of housing every day - six or seven of whom have nowhere else to stay. "At the end of each afternoon, you just feel exhausted," says Linda Ray. Especially when you have to tell dozens of faces that they don't qualify for help.

On being refused by Linda a couple of weeks ago, a woman pulled out a jar, unscrewed the lid and lobbed it under the screen. It was full of bed bugs. I'm shown the desks they crawled over, the carpet that had to be fumigated.

And under the now-familiar arithmetic of austerity, more work and more stress is parcelled out among fewer staff. While the Guardian was at John Wilkes, 10 employees received redundancy letters.

Finally, there's the big picture. "We're being hit by a perfect storm: rising house prices, the squeeze in the rental market and the benefit cap," says Sally McTernan, who runs Enfield's housing service. Like the people turning up at John Wilkes, her team is being tossed about by forces beyond their control.

What do you do when your options are being cut daily by the market and central government? If you're Enfield, you try and create a few more. To reduce its dependence on private rentals, the council has arranged a credit facility of £100m and begun bulk-buying homes. It's introducing a scheme to license private landlords so controversial that it's being challenged in court. And for the first time in 30 years it is building council houses. Furthermore, in defiance of Eric Pickles, it is using a loophole that means it won't give tenants the right to buy.

Emergency, emergency, emergency

To see why these schemes matter, go up to the first floor of John Wilkes, where staff try to sort out Christina. The council has a duty to house her family, the question is: where? Her case-worker, Rob Andrew, marches over to the temporary accommodation team with a wad of paperwork and a pinch of self-deprecation. "You're going to love me!"

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The council is buying properties wherever it can afford to. It has already acquired one of the flats in this apartment block on Colyton Way. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

Nothing doing, says Andy Wheeler: "I've got at least three others waiting for three-beds before she gets even a look-in." A colleague goes to the last resort: ringing around hotels.

Wheeler pulls out a yellow ring-binder, each sheet a ledger of the day's appointees placed in a flat or house. But at the foot of the forms are handwritten entries of people who came in off the street needing somewhere to stay that night.

"Emergency," he taps the sheets as he flicks. "Emergency, emergency, emergency, emergency: a bad day. Emergency, emergency, emergency ..." As the days go by, the handwriting gradually fills up more of the papers.

After 30 years of right-to-buy and no new council houses, Enfield's stock of homes has halved. "We've gone from being a provider of council homes to a provider of emergency homes," says John Wilkes manager, Mike Bobbett.

The new walk-ins are typically people like Christina, evicted by a landlord wanting more rent than David Cameron's benefits cap allows.

Conservatives initially promised that the cap on housing benefit would force landlords to accept lower rents. Instead, rents in London are rising at double the national rate. The bottom of the housing market is in turmoil, with an exodus of poor households out of inner London to traditionally low-rent neighbourhoods such as the eastern half of Enfield.

Central boroughs, such as Westminster and Kensington, are also shifting families to cheaper parts of London's periphery.

"Authorities are now gazumping each other," says Ahmet Oykener, Enfield council cabinet member for housing. "Croydon [council, on the edge of south London] calls our officers about properties in our backyard to warn, 'Butt out, it's ours.' Where are we meant to put our homeless?"

One London authority has placed 1,000 households in Enfield, he claims. "Forget homes: think about what that means for local schools and GP practices."

Making things worse, big landlords and their agents are cutting down on long-term lets. They prefer the vastly more profitable and insecure overnight rentals.

Here's an email that's just reached Wheeler, and presumably every other council homelessness department in London. It invites bids for a two-bed in Mill Hill, on the edge of north London, for £85 a night. Per calendar month, that works out as £2,585 - for which you could take a flat on Harley Street. Still, he reckons it'll go.

Enfield has about 480 households in what's called nightly paid accommodation. The cost is ruinous - and getting worse. Last winter, the council worked out that over a year each overnight rental would cost an additional £5,000 on top of housing benefits; now it estimates the premium has risen to £5,500.

House hunters

Peter Robinson is the only man in this house wearing a suit.

About 20 minutes up the road from John Wilkes, the auction property is heaving with young couples dreaming of getting on the ladder, and weekend developers. But Robinson in his Daz-white shirt doesn't plan to move in.

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One of the properties bought by the council. Its remit is to buy cheap homes, and so it is more interested in the price and number of bedrooms than decor. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

For most people, buying a home is the biggest financial decision they'll make in their lives. Robinson will be making dozens of such calls in just the next few months.

He's bulk-buying homes for Enfield. Rather than keep paying profiteering landlords, Ahmet and fellow councillors established a company to purchase new houses, arranged a credit facility of £100m, and imposed targets for the number of units to be snapped up every month.

The programme began in March with one officer, an endearingly serious South African called Detlev Munster. Never having done anything similar, Munster did what boffins do: he drew up an intricate flow chart for how to hoover up homes.

But since flow charts don't do viewings, he rapidly built up the team. Robinson was drafted in - a consultant surveyor, who travels up from the City to view property in some of the most rundown bits of Enfield. Then came Tim Bentley, who watches the local market for new listings, plugging them into a model to assess suitability. And Neo Georghiou has just joined to do the evening and weekend viewings.

Other London councils pick up the odd property, out of the same dire need as Enfield. But I haven't heard of anything like this: a purpose-built team of municipal house-hunters.

These buyers aren't fussed about character or location, but affordability. If the model deems a house too costly, it doesn't get seen. Cheap properties needing expensive repairs are dropped. Before making an offer, Munster has to seek the assent of colleagues. "Everybody's become Phil Spencer and Sarah Beeny," he sighs.

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Andy Wheeler with his yellow folder, trying to book emergency accommodation for those who need it most. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

As property-buying goes, this process lacks all the usual dreams and heat. This auction home, for instance, has a 1970s-style avocado bathroom suite, which any owner-occupier would tear out with their bare hands, but Robinson reckons it can stay. His main worry is that the council will get outbid.

With good reason. Look at this spreadsheet kept by the team of its progress:

Properties viewed: 64

Offers placed: 44

The high ratio of offers to viewings proves the worth of Bentley's sifting. But see what happens next:

Offers accepted: 23

Of these, offers proceeding: 18

Completed: 2

That drop shows how, in a fast-rising market, the value-conscious council is being elbowed aside by bigger spenders. Were Sisyphus around today, he wouldn't be pushing boulders up hills, but trying to buy fairly priced housing amid a massive bubble.

Without making Munster's task harder by revealing to estate agents his buying targets, let me just say that the total secured since March is less than the goal for one month.

The two properties he has bought are former council flats. To alleviate its housing crisis, the local authority is buying back, with public money, homes it was forced to sell at a steep discount under Thatcher's right-to-buy scheme.

And yes, Oykener and the council are keenly aware of the irony.

The temporary village

Back at John Wilkes, officers have unexpectedly good news: they've found Christina a house.

As Andrew explains to her, it's outside London, which means longer school runs. And it's temporary, so the family can be moved on at any time. But to look at Christina, who's had nightmares of sleeping on the streets and her kids getting taken away by social services, is to see pure relief.

This isn't a home, it's an interim arrangement - but it's one that, given the lack of other options, might endure for years. Andrew reels off a list of places where Christina could afford to rent on her reduced benefits. None are within the M25; one, Southend-on-Sea, is an hour's drive.

Christina: "That's miles away!"

Andrew: "We didn't make the rules!"

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The Bury Street West site is several acres of derelict land that the council is going to build 180 homes on. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

The 300,000-resident borough has sprouted what is in effect a large village of 2,200 households, say 9,000 people, living in temporary accommodation. That's the seventh highest of all local authorities, and it keeps climbing.

Housing families who no longer receive the benefits or other income to house themselves costs Enfield £3.3m a year. Growing demand and rising rents means that sum is projected to more than double this financial year, to £7.8m.

Imagine being a council seeing a housing crisis rip through your financial planning and chuck around some of your most-vulnerable residents. That is what's forced Enfield to experiment.

London borough of Barratt

Off one of Enfield's main streets, behind brick walls and locked gates, lies a patch of land about the size of three football pitches. It's here that the civic centre plans its biggest housing gambit yet.

The parks department once used Bury Street West as a store for lawnmowers and to wash out wheelie bins. Soon it will form part of the council's first programme of housebuilding for 30 years.

Munster is a key part of this project, too. Gesturing at the abandoned land in front of us, he talks about how it'll soon be a mini-village, with up to 180 flats and houses. It will back on to a brook and adjoin a nature trail and put council homes in the same blocks as private ones.

This site is one of several on which the civic centre plans to build about 280 new municipal homes, starting this September.

It doesn't sound like much. It isn't much, considering the scale of Enfield's housing crisis: only the tiniest puncture in a large balloon. But put this in perspective: Sheffield has more than 61,000 households waiting for a home; yet according to government figures, the city built no council homes last year.

So thoroughly has the post-Thatcher public sector lost the skills, confidence and financial scope to build, that - when a town hall either adds to or overhauls its housing stock - it usually sells the land to a developer, agrees some easily bent stipulations on social homes and retreats to a blameless distance.

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Enfield tears up rules in radical attempt to ease housing problem

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Christina is at breaking point. The thing is, so are the people she's asking for help. Christina and her three kids have nowhere to stay. Their private landlord chucked them out after she fell behind on the rent, poleaxed by the coalition's cap on welfare benefits.

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Speaking Back to Stigma - great article by Tracy Jensen on social housing in East London (Ruth Patrick0 

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Speaking Back to Stigma - great article by Tracy Jensen on social housing in East London (Ruth Patrick0 

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http://discoversociety.org/2014/11/04/speaking-back-to-stigma-social-housing-and-solidarity-in-east-london/

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Ruth Patrick - The Conservatives extend the right to buy http://news.sky.com/story/1464585/right-to-buy-what-is-it-and-how-does-it-work

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Gill Mooney - Houses of Multiple Occupancy: Blackpool

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Gill Mooney - Houses of Multiple Occupancy: Blackpool

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Landlords presiding over overcrowded, badly maintained properties.

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A growing number of people on low incomes are now living in shared housing - known as "houses in multiple occupation" - where each room is rented separately. But there's concern that many tenants are living in poor conditions.

In a dirty entrance hall of a large run down seafront building, Alex Bracken vigorously shakes a can of flea spray. She sprays everyone's legs thoroughly.

"There are quite a lot of fleas in this property. We were badly bitten last week," she explains.

Bracken, Blackpool's Council's housing enforcement manager, leads the way up the badly carpeted stairs, followed by two colleagues and a police community support officer. They check a fire extinguisher in the landing. It is empty.

A dog barks inside one of the 24 flats. Bracken knocks loudly: "Blackpool Council. Open up please. We need to come in."

After some minutes the door opens and two pale women peer out. A strong, musty smell drifts outwards.

A roll of sticky paper hanging from the ceiling is covered in dead flies. An empty vodka bottle stands on a dusty table. The Staffordshire terrier barks and a scrawny cat paws the dirty furniture. The tenant is not there, his girlfriend says.

Bracken is here to deliver letters warning tenants about anti-social behaviour. Neighbours have been complaining about noise, drunkenness and threats of violence.

On the way back downstairs she meets the tenant, a young man in a hoodie whose teeth are stained yellow and brown. "This is serious," she tells him. "If you continue your anti-social behaviour we will take further enforcement action which could result in prosecution."

He nods and agrees to contact a local charity to rehouse the cat.

This property, right on the seafront and a short distance from the tower, is one of Blackpool's 4,000 Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs). Many of them are at the bottom rung of Britain's housing ladder.

Finding accurate information about the number of HMOs across the UK is not straightforward. Each local authority keeps figures, but these are only estimates as not all HMOs have to be licensed - only larger properties over three storeys high with five or more unrelated tenants and shared facilities.

The National HMO Network, made up of local authorities, environmental health officers and landlords, says there were 543,000 HMOs in England in 2013-14. The number is rising and more and more people are living in them.

It's horrible living here. It's damp. My little girl is even saying, 'It smells in your room, Dad'
Michael Buckley, Housing tenant

Badly run HMOs are a problem across the UK, but in Blackpool they have become one of the town's most urgent priorities.

With the decline of its tourism industry, many former guesthouses have been turned into HMOs without needing any change in planning permission.

A 10-bed property in Blackpool can cost as little as £60,000 to £70,000. Landlords can collect £85 per week for each room, often from housing benefit. This lucrative trade is attracting landlords from all over the UK and overseas.

Next on their round of inspections, housing officers visit a property in a road of red-brick terraces. In the front garden the rubbish bins are overflowing. A tattered mattress lies across a bed of weeds.

In the downstairs flat, lives Michael Buckley, with his partner Shauny Goodman and their two small children. He has two other children who stay at weekends.

Housing officers are here to inspect the property because he has complained about damp. Buckley shows them dark musty patches on the walls.

"It's horrible living here. It's damp," he says. "I've got kids who are in it every day. My little girl is even saying: 'It smells in your room, Dad.'

"So we have to constantly wash our clothes. The washing machine is blasting all the time. My clothes are fresh, but when I put them in the room there's a musty smell."

Housing officers find several problems with the property. Bracken tells him she will send a schedule of works to the landlord. He has 28 days to respond.

Last year her team made 4,000 inspections like this in Blackpool. Half the properties were found to be below standard and her team ordered landlords to make improvements.

"Blackpool has a major problem with HMOs," says Tim Coglan, Blackpool Council's head of public protection. "You have some badly run properties that are rundown, dangerous and the focus of anti-social behaviour and crime.

"The vast majority are run on the basis of spending the minimum on upkeep, cutting corners as far as possible."

Blackpool Council says it has prosecuted more landlords than any other unitary authority in the UK. It also runs a selective licensing system in some areas, requiring landlords to register properties.

Blackpool is the seventh most deprived area in England, according to statistics published last month by the Department for Communities, based on employment, housing, health, crime and income levels.

Coglan says many unemployed people from all over the North West move to Blackpool. "'Transients' are a problem in Blackpool. A lot of people with no connections to the town and a high level of social need come here," he says.

"There are poor people some who have no connection to Blackpool housed in substandard accommodation whose needs are not being met - they may have issues with drugs and alcohol. So it is not just enforcing against bad landlords it's about making sure tenants get the help they need."

However, there are some who think not enough is being done to stop the growing number of HMOs. Charlie Docherty runs the Astoria Hotel in Hull Road, a guesthouse near the seafront.

"It used to be great living here but it's not any more," he says. "All we talk about is the same issue - HMOs. We hear ambulances going by, sirens going past... people lying in the street off their faces."

"The council's mantra is 'we want families back'. Families won't come back when they are approached by aggressive begging, drug dealing, prostitution, anti-social behaviour."

Docherty, a Glaswegian who worked offshore before buying his hotel, points out a four-storey former guesthouse, now an HMO which he says has been a focus of anti-social behaviour.

"It's the worst house on the street. The police are constantly round here," he says.

At that moment a car pulls up and out steps a suited man with a large chain of keys around his neck and a yellow torch in one hand. John Bartram, owner of JJ Property Services, manages 400 HMOs in Blackpool.

He has come to inspect the property, but Docherty challenges him. "Properties like yours are the reason people are not coming back to Blackpool."

Bartram stands his ground. "If properties are run properly, which I do my utmost to ensure, I can't see anything wrong with these places."

Bartram says he has evicted problem tenants from this building and works hard to resolve any problems. But Docherty continues his complaint, pointing at the exterior of the property.

"Look at the railings. The bells. This is one of the best streets in Blackpool. Clean it up. A lick of paint. If you want decent tenants you need a decent property."

"On behalf of my landlords, they are on budgets, they have big mortgages," Bartram argues. "As long as the inside complies with what is acceptable to the local authority."

Bartram worked as a coal miner until 1993 when he used his redundancy money to buy a Blackpool hotel. Nine years later he sold it and began his lettings business. He has landlords from across the UK and some from overseas.

John Bartram and Charlie Docherty part with a handshake, agreeing to differ.

However, while much of the UK is suffering from a shortage of homes, some think Blackpool's problem is that it has too many.

Like many councils, Blackpool's is also facing steep budget cuts. The workload of its housing enforcement team is unlikely to slacken off any time soon.

Housing Britain

Interactive: Where can I afford to live?

In video: What the average price will buy you

Q&A: Why are starter homes controversial?

Mark Easton: The political power of bricks and mortar
A selection of your comments:
The main problem with the rooms shown appears to be dirt and neglect. A luxury mansion flat in Belgravia would look pretty grim if filth and grease accumulated all around the kitchen and mould was allowed to grow on the shower. Do people not clean anything in these houses? As there were no other views of the property to give any idea of the structural condition, I can only say from what is shown that some hot water, soap, disinfectant and a scrubbing brush might well work wonders and improve life all round for the tenants. Make a rota!
Rosina Clark, Colchester, UK
I have lived in a HMO for just under two years now. As much as it is not ideal, it's cheap and all that I can afford as a single person, even though I work full time. I find that problem tenants are dealt with very quickly, in the hope of gaining some stable tenants. However, as this article points out, repairs and maintenance from landlords is hard to get. The house I am in does have damp, and this and it's cause have been pointed out, but little has been done. The boiler doesn't hold its pressure, there are many drafts and the house doesn't have insulation, so it becomes very cold in the winter. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone that has the money to live in a small flat or house, but for me that just isn't an option right now.
Stephanie Owens, Gillingham, UK
I've lived in shared properties but I didn't treat them like the interior cleanliness was my landlord's responsibility. These people are paying for a room in a house, not a maid, so surely the general cleaning is their responsibility. The landlord does of course have their role to play but why should that extend to doing the tenants' washing up, vacuuming and taking their bins out on bin day? The houses in this article are disgraceful and the tenants should be evicted if they cannot keep them clean enough for habitation and behave like decent members of society.
Tessa, Basingstoke, UK
Very very disturbing, especially at the time when HMO industry gets all nuts and bolts tighten up to all possible and impossible limits. As we can see here - this excessive regulations clearly don't add any more value. Those who allow this kind of disgrace will never even consider them. Those who do however, suffer the most, as there is clearly over-complicated regulations exist in this industry and they (agents and landlords) are barely able to catch up with all those little nuances. Stop the madness - do the basics! On the other hand, just by looking at the pictures above, there is so much more Tenants themselves can do to keep it in a much better shape. Let's not blame just agents here. Dump - yes, up to agents to sort out, but all that rubbish on the bad, carpet and all over the place - I am sorry, what kind of people live there? You don't need millions to keep all this stuff nicely where it belongs and look after your bad and carpet properly. They just don't care about themselves - why would they expect someone else to take care about them?
Alex Soul, London, UK Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox.

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A growing number of people on low incomes are now living in shared housing - known as "houses in multiple occupation" - where each room is rented separately. But there's concern that many tenants are living in poor conditions. In a dirty entrance hall of a large run down seafront building, Alex Bracken vigorously shakes a can of flea spray.

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An explanation of bedroom tax, whereby social housing tenants must pay for any spare rooms they may have.

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Find out if you are affected by cuts to your housing benefit if you're a council or housing association tenant with a spare bedroom.
What is the bedroom tax?

The bedroom tax is a cut in housing benefit if you live in a council or housing association home and are classed as having a spare bedroom.

You claim housing benefit from the council. You can only claim for a certain number of bedrooms, depending on who lives in your home.

Who the bedroom tax applies to

You may get less housing benefit if you're a council or housing association tenant and:

you have more bedrooms than the rules allow

you're of working age

The bedroom tax will not apply for the first 13 weeks of your housing benefit claim if you haven't claimed within the last 52 weeks.

When the bedroom tax doesn't apply

If you or your partner are of pension credit age and claiming housing benefit you won't be affected by the bedroom tax.
Use the Gov.uk calculator to check when you reach pension credit age
The bedroom tax doesn't apply to you if you live in:

private rented housing (local housing allowance is worked out using different rules)

certain types of temporary or supported accommodation

How much housing benefit you lose

Bedroom tax is applied to your 'net rent' (the rent when things like water charges are removed, as these aren't covered by housing benefit). The housing benefit office calls this your 'eligible rent'.

The amount of net rent is cut by:

14% if you have one spare bedroom

25% if you have two or more spare bedrooms

For example, if your net rent is £100 a week, you need to pay the following extra rent yourself:

£14 more if you have one spare room

£25 more if you have two spare rooms

Bedrooms allowed for household members

You can get housing benefit for 1 bedroom for each:

adult couple

member of a couple who can't share a bedroom because of a disability

single person over 16 (including lodgers and friends or relatives who live with you)

disabled child under 16 who can't share a bedroom because of their disability

2 children of the same sex under 16

2 children of either sex under 10

Your housing benefit might still be reduced if a lodger pays you rent or you live with adult friends or relatives who are expected to contribute to your rent.

Extra bedroom for an overnight carer

You can get housing benefit for a spare bedroom if a non-resident carer (or team of carers) regularly stays overnight to provide care to you or another household member.

The person who needs care must provide evidence of overnight care needs or get one of the following disability benefits:

disability living allowance (DLA) - middle or high care component

personal independence payment (PIP) - daily living component

attendance allowance

You can only get housing benefit for one extra bedroom under this rule.

Extra bedroom if you're a foster carer

You can get housing benefit for an extra bedroom if you're a foster carer and you have:

a foster child placed with you

fostered or been approved within the last 12 months and are waiting for a placement

You can only get housing benefit for one extra bedroom under this rule, regardless of the number of foster children living with you.

If household members are away

Your housing benefit will not be affected if your child is in the armed forces and away on operations if they:

lived with you before they went away

intend to return home when not on operations

They can be away indefinitely as long as they intend to return.

The following household members can also count as occupying their bedroom if they are only away temporarily:

students who are returning regularly, for example during holidays

people in hospital who intend to return within 52 weeks

prisoners who are sentenced to 6 months or less

Bedrooms you can't get housing benefit for

You can't get housing benefit for bedrooms you use for:

children who've left home and don't plan to return

visiting children who live elsewhere and who you don't claim child benefit for

a 'sanctuary room', where your home was adapted to make it secure for you after you experienced domestic violence

storage of medical or specialist equipment

If your circumstances change

You must tell the council if your circumstances change so that your housing benefit can be recalculated.

This could be if:

your child leaves home

your child is too old to continue sharing a bedroom with a child of the opposite sex (as soon as they're 10 years old)

you have a baby or adopt or foster a child

a relative or lodger moves in with you

you or your partner reach pension credit age

If someone in your household dies you must report this to the council. Your housing benefit won't be reduced for 12 months after the death.

What to do if your housing benefit is cut

If housing benefit doesn't cover your full rent, you must pay the shortfall yourself or you risk losing your home.

You could:

You could also apply to the council for a discretionary housing payment.

Appeal against the council's decision

You can ask the council to look at their decision again if you think your housing benefit shouldn't have been cut.
Use Shelter's directory to find a local benefits adviser to help

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Find out if you are affected by cuts to your housing benefit if you're a council or housing association tenant with a spare bedroom. The bedroom tax is a cut in housing benefit if you live in a council or housing association home and are classed as having a spare bedroom.

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Sophie Mackey - How to Live the Chelsea Life. "Young entrepreneur Adam Goff wants to revolutionise the London rental market, with an exclusive high-end living club, Capital Living. But does he risk alienating the residents of such a diverse city?" 

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Sophie Mackey - How to Live the Chelsea Life. "Young entrepreneur Adam Goff wants to revolutionise the London rental market, with an exclusive high-end living club, Capital Living. But does he risk alienating the residents of such a diverse city?" 

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Gill Mooney - New 'affordable homes' startlingly unaffordable

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Gill Mooney - New 'affordable homes' startlingly unaffordable

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For families on the 'national living wage' the government's new affordable homes will only be actually affordable in 2% of England's council areas.

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The Great Housing Benefit Scandal;

Unscrupulous landlords are getting millions of pounds from the taxpayer for housing people in cramped and poor quality accommodation. These housing benefit kings make big profits from the system, while their tenants live very different lives. Reporter Alys Harte investigates some of the offenders - including the slum landlord who had 40 people living in one house and the businessman who hides his properties behind front companies and false names.

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The Great Housing Benefit Scandal, Panorama - BBC One

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Alys Harte investigates unscrupulous landlords getting millions from the taxpayer.

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Byker Wall: An example of slum clearence and social housing.

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Building Sights - Series 1: 4. Byker Wall

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Beatrix Campbell looks at the Byker Wall housing estate in Newcastle. (1988)

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Lauren Williams- Thousands gather in London to protest against lack of affordable housing

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Lauren Williams- Thousands gather in London to protest against lack of affordable housing

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Thousands of people gathered outside City Hall on Saturday to demand Boris Johnson
urgently tackle the lack of affordable housing in the capital and curb

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Our housing system fails young people who fall between the cracks

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It's easy to assume there are only three housing tenures in Britain: social housing, private renting and home ownership. While those are how most people live, they conceal the lives of others who are falling through the cracks.

From temporary accommodation and supported accommodation to homeless hostels, there is a large minority of individuals who could be placed into yet another category: those who can't even rent. Many of these are young people who have been helped out of crisis in the earliest stages of their lives but are now trapped. Supported accommodation may have helped them avoid nights on the street or years of sofa surfing, but the lack of social housing and the cost of private renting means they can't move on with their lives.

According to a survey carried out by the YMCA (where the average age of respondents was 25 years old, but ranged up to 70) 81% of supported accommodation residents say they are worried about finding somewhere to live when they are ready to move on. More than half (56%) say they feel ready to move out but are unable to do, and 20% have already been waiting more than six months to find somewhere to live.

They cite the problems that face all renters: lack of affordable housing and rent rises, landlords refusing people claiming housing benefit. Less than a third are unable to save any money towards a tenancy deposit.

The odds are stacked against these young people in their attempt to find financial security leading to a home - even a room - of their own. The New Policy Institute found that young people claiming employment-related benefits are more likely than older claimants to face a sanction resulting in a suspension of their income, and young men are most at risk.

More than one in three claims made by men are sanctioned. Half of claims made by those aged under 25 and referred to the sanctions system result in a sanction - meaning approximately one-third of all benefit claims made by under-25s are sanctioned.

Employment is no guarantee of stability either. The YMCA research highlights the case of a 19-year-old who became homeless at 18 after a fight with her family. She lived at a YMCA for eight months and then found work as a carer, allowing her to move on. But she is on a flexible contract, meaning her hours fluctuate between 16 and 45 a week. Her variable wages mean she is unable to afford local rents and is again sofa surfing while trying to hold down her job. She describes her predicament: "I had a good roof over my head but I've lost it by working. I like earning my own money - but at what cost?"

Supported accommodation is a critically important part of our housing market; if it becomes bed blocked by people desperate to move on and secure their own independence, there is nowhere for the rising number of homeless people to go.

The YMCA advises the creation of a new help-to-rent scheme to clear the upfront hurdles faced by prospective tenants who just can't afford to rent. It rightly states that rent deposit schemes and other projects run by local authorities to support this group of people amount to a postcode lottery.

That might be pragmatic but I find the proposal unlikely to be accepted into any mainstream manifesto this year. It's not just that it would prove so expensive - the number of people qualifying will only rise in the coming years - but that it sends out such a damning message about recent governments' ability to preside over an economy that can provide a home for all. It would be an admission of failure of the most basic security that we should all expect as a British citizen.

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Our housing system fails young people who fall between the cracks

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It's easy to assume there are only three housing tenures in Britain: social housing, private renting and home ownership. While those are how most people live, they conceal the lives of others who are falling through the cracks.

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Can't gift something it is not yours to give

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The fundamental problem with the privatisation of public services is that, once they're gone, they're gone. They are no longer under the control of our elected representatives. The result is a hollowing out of democracy, where actual power shrinks to a tight core at the centre and government loses control of some of the most essential services and structures in our society, so that elections makes less and less difference to citizens and their wellbeing.

You'd think that's the Conservative party, keen as it is to shrink the state, would understand that. But the latest hair-brained pre-election housing policy emanating from the mouth of work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith seems to belie a fundamental misunderstanding of that fact.

Duncan Smith's plan to "gift" social housing to unemployed tenants who find a job is unworkable for so many reasons, not least because the majority of people of working age who live in social housing and who can work, already do. That aside, the killer blow to his idea is that it forgets that most social housing is not the state's to give away.

In transferring council homes to housing associations in the 1990s and beyond, the responsibility and the rights to those properties were lost by the state. By 2011, housing associations were collectively worth more than £100bn.

Housing associations receive funding from government to develop new homes, but those homes are neither owned by the state nor can they be manipulated to do the state's work. Government chose to shed risk, and it lost reward. IDS might like the idea of handing it over to tenants he deems deserving, creating an (albeit small) generation of grateful homeowners, but his ideas have no legal basis.

For years the Conservatives, and even some factions within Labour, have toyed with the idea of extending the right-to-buy to housing association properties. This may seem desirable because it removes inequalities between social tenants. However, the right-to-buy, just like the great IDS giveaway, requires the ability to be able to take a choice over slashing costs for tenants. Most housing associations are charities, legally obliged to secure a full return on their assets to serve their beneficiaries, and all developing organisations are leveraged up to the hilt having borrowed against the homes they have in an attempt to build desperately-needed new ones.

Housing associations are independent, commercial entities. The argument that, like the banks, they have become "too big to fail" (and are therefore always within arm's reach of the state) is laughable, because there's always another association willing to pick up the pieces by merger or acquisition. It's impossible to imagine a situation where central or local government would be forced to take a housing association's stock back in house. It didn't happen in Glasgow when the largest state-driven housing transfer project began to fall apart, so it's implausible now.

Whether or not you think handing out homes to tenants apropos of pure luck is a good idea, IDS seems to have understood the paradox of privatisation and accepted that retaining control of essential assets that affect our shared future is sensible.

To offer any kind of guiding hand on the role that housing plays, government must now make a fundamental change to its approach: it should label housing as a form of infrastructure.

In this regard, Britain is a European anachronism. Most of our neighbouring countries accept that housing is so closely linked to economic performance that it is in fact a form of infrastructure. Taking this leap - which would involve committing to planning and funding housing programmes spanning three decades or longer - would not banish the spectre of privatisation (think on the fate of our railways). But it might mean that, when it come to taking a decision - whether or not we approve of the outcome - our elected representatives won't remain impotent.

for your free Guardian Housing network newsletter with news and analysis sent direct to you every Friday. Follow us: @GuardianHousing
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Social housing is no longer yours to give away, Iain Duncan Smith

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The fundamental problem with the privatisation of public services is that, once they're gone, they're gone. They are no longer under the control of our elected representatives.

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Housing regeneration for social housing with Guinness partnership.

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The Guinness Partnership explains welfare reform

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Giving you the information you need on the changes to the benefit system - bedroom tax, universal credit, benefit cap, under occupancy penalty

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Delaine DeCraemer - Guinness Partnership defers eviction of Brixton social housing tenant

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Delaine DeCraemer - Guinness Partnership defers eviction of Brixton social housing tenant

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Tenants on a social housing estate in Brixton, south London, celebrated a partial victory on Thursday when a housing charity deferred an eviction, and agreed that they should be allowed to apply for other properties it owns.

With more than 60,000 homes and 120,000 residents, the Guinness Partnership is one of Britain's largest providers of affordable housing. Its conflict with 44 short-term tenants in the Loughborough Park estate, just a few minutes' walk away from vibrant Brixton market, reflects the growing crisis in London at the lack of affordable homes despite - or because of - a large number of regeneration schemes.

Guinness says it is spending approximately £100m tearing down 390 flats built in 1939 and replacing them with bright, spacious and energy efficient flats to give residents more space, modern kitchens and bathrooms. Once finished none of the new 487 homes will be for outright sale or rent at market rates.

But for the development to be financially viable, Guinness says the new estate will include different types of accommodation - including social rent, affordable rent, and shared ownership. However, affordable rent can be set at up to 80% of the local market rent, which will be out of reach of those on low incomes.

Most residents in Loughborough Park have benefited from the redevelopment, according to Guinness. Those with a "lifetime tenancy" are being rehoused in the brand new flats and many have already moved into their new homes, where the social rent for a one bedroom is £94 a week.

Short-term tenants, however, have not so been lucky. Those holding "assured shorthold tenancies" do not enjoy long-term rights, and Guinness is under no obligation to rehouse them. Residents in the 44 properties with short-term tenancies in the four remaining blocks have been told to leave by April 2015 as the estate moves into the final phase of the redevelopment.

Guinness have offered various financial inducements, including £4,700 and another £1,500 to help towards a rent deposit and any rent in advance for accommodation in the private sector.

Short-term tenancies are common in regeneration schemes as homes could otherwise stand empty before work begins. But in the case of Loughborough Park, many of the tenants have lived there for over 10 years and claim they will have to find somewhere to live outside London as they can no longer afford Brixton rents. They currently pay about £120 a week.

Guinness said the terms of the short-term tenancies were explicit from the start: "We have been clear with residents on assured shorthold tenancies that they would not be entitled to be rehoused when the site was redeveloped, and they agreed to this when they moved in."

Beitel Mehari, 42, a single mother who has lived in the estate for 10 years with her children, aged seven and eight, has fallen victim to Guinness' refusal to budge. She has proved to be just as tough in a campaign that has attracted the support of the Green party, including Rashid Nix, its Dulwich and West Norwood parliamentary candidate in the May general election, and squeezed some concessions from Guinness.

"Guinness tried to clean their hands of us, telling us to go to get help from the council," she said. "But the council are overseeing this regeneration and are giving us nothing. "Since we stepped up our campaign, Guinness have made the offer of applying for secure housing but told us it could not be in London. This is not right.

"We will not negotiate, we demanded to be housed by Guinness in our borough. Our campaign has now forced them to let us apply for flats in London but still they say getting housed is not guaranteed. We are telling them we won't move until we get rehoused in the local area."

Nix, who lived in on the Loughborough Park estate himself, accused Guinness of not fully explaining the implications of regeneration to the short-term tenants when it was trying to attract residents to this part of Brixton before gentrification made the area desirable.

"These people are fighting for their dignity," he said. "They have been paying rent for 10 years."

The proliferation of regeneration schemes in London, where poorer people are being squeezed out, is becoming an increasingly sensitive political issue. On Tuesday police arrested six people during a major operation to support the eviction of protesters from the Aylesbury Estate - a rallying point for campaigners.

In a march for homes in January, 5,000 people encircled City Hall to demand Boris Johnson urgently tackle the lack of affordable housing by building more council homes, control private rents and called off the proposed demolition of properties on up to 70 London estates.
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Guinness Partnership defers eviction of Brixton social housing tenant

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Tenants on a social housing estate in Brixton, south London, celebrated a partial victory on Thursday when a housing charity deferred an eviction, and agreed that they should be allowed to apply for other properties it owns. With more than 60,000 homes and 120,000 residents, the Guinness Partnership is one of Britain's largest providers of affordable housing.

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If anyone's knock around London today

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Radical Housing Network: BLOCK THE BUDGET!
Mayor Boris Johnson is currently the most powerful politician in London when it comes to decisions on housing and his final mayoral budget will be put to the vote on February 23rd. It is highly likely that GLA members, so called representatives of Londoners city wide, will pass his budget. Everyone knows that Boris' Budget equals HOUSING CRISIS - sky high rents, sell offs of public land, nonsense 'affordable housing,' that is, more social cleansing, more landlord profits and more homelessness in London. Join us on the 23rd to BLOCK THE BUDGET! We demand social housing not social cleansing!

The demonstration will be kid and family friendly. Music and Food. Assemble from 9am in front of the Town Hall.

More info:

London's Mayor is the single most powerful politician in London when it comes to housing. The Mayor is responsible for producing the statutory London Housing Strategy, he controls a budget of £1.8 billion for delivering new homes and holds a land portfolio that covers over 500 hectares of London (the size of 600 international football pitches) and extensive property.

This money and power over housing is being voted on at the final budget setting on 23rd Feb 2015 at City Hall.

Boris says that an overarching priority of this budget is to "find every way possible for hard-working Londoners to access decent, low cost affordable housing". But that's not true. Only a tiny fraction of the homes that the mayor is delivering are genuinely affordable, and all 500 hectares of GLA owned land is being sold to private property developers that will restrict access to housing for most Londoners. Profiting from the need for shelter is not acceptable!

While a national election looms this action will be a reminder to politicians of the strength of feeling and willingness to act of people across all housing tenures, across the whole of London. BLOCK THE BUDGET is a warning that we intend to force politicians to respond to what all Londoners really need.

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Radical Housing Network: BLOCK THE BUDGET!

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Category(ies) Radical Housing Network: BLOCK THE BUDGET! Mayor Boris Johnson is currently the most powerful politician in London when it comes to decisions on housing and his final mayoral budget will be put to the vote on February 23rd. It is highly likely that GLA members, so called representatives of Londoners city wide, will pass his budget.

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THE IMPACTS OF HOUSING STOCK TRANSFERS IN URBAN BRITAIN

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The transfer of council estates into housing association (HA) ownership has transformed the structure of social housing provision across Britain; in half of English local authorities council housing is a thing of the past. From 1997, stock transfer extended beyond rural shire districts, with urban estates accounting for the majority of properties being handed to new social landlords. This study focuses on the impacts of these 'second generation' transfers.

Key points

Although the challenges faced by many 'second generation' transfer HAs have been far greater than for their earlier counterparts, the landlords concerned have been no less successful in delivering transfer promises.

Ballot commitments outperformed by transfer HAs have greatly outnumbered pledges delayed or unmet.

Second generation transfer HAs have typically implemented housing stock upgrades to standards appreciably higher than those officially prescribed (e.g. in the Decent Homes Standard).

Second generation transfers have stimulated tenants' involvement in organisational decision-making, at both collective and individual level.

Transfer HAs have realised aspirations to 'transform organisational culture', especially in the emergence of a less hierarchical, more inclusive and more customer-focused corporate ethos than existed in former council housing departments.

Most second generation transfer HAs have become involved in neighbourhood regeneration - including social and economic renewal - to a much greater degree than anticipated at the time of transfer. Most have developed community facilities and contributed to community services beyond housing management.

Background

Over the two decades 1988-2008, the transfer of council estates into housing association (HA) ownership has transformed the structure of social housing provision across Britain. With more than 1.3 million council homes transferred into HA ownership in that period, housing associations stand poised to become the majority social housing provider at the national level. By 2008, council housing was a thing of the past in half of all English local authority areas.

The decade from 1997 saw stock transfer extend beyond relatively affluent rural shire districts, with urban estates - many highly deprived - accounting for the majority of properties concerned. Most such transfers aimed to address dilapidated property condition, halt neighbourhood decline, and sometimes remedy a legacy of mediocre housing management. Virtually all HAs assuming ownership of former council stock have been newly created social landlords initially staffed largely by former council employees. For these new landlords, the circumstances of post-1997 transfers presented greater challenges than for most of their earlier counterparts, and in contrast to earlier transfers many required explicit public funding.

This study has termed these post-1997 transactions 'second generation' transfers. Using secondary data analysis, a national survey of transfer promises and case studies of ten transfer HAs, it investigated the impacts of the transfer process, focusing on these second generation transactions.

Transfer promises and delivery of investment

As a rule, the ballot pledges made by second generation transfer HAs were dominated by commitments to channel fresh investment into housing repair and modernisation. Promises of improved housing management, though also commonly stated, were usually of a lower order. Uniquely, a key pledge for the Glasgow HA transfer was a commitment to progress 'second-stage transfers' - handing over packages of housing to a constellation of community-based landlords. However, reflecting city council awareness that this would require additional funds, the language of this official commitment was highly qualified.

In their own estimation, transfer HAs have been highly successful in meeting their ballot commitments, especially on catch-up repairs and modernisation. For transfer promises across the board, instances of commitments being reportedly exceeded greatly outnumber those undelivered or held up.

Since 1988, transfer promises on property repairs and modernisation have been facilitated by funding totalling £24bn in England alone. Almost £20bn of this (including nearly £5bn of public funding) relates to 1998-2008. Generally, urban transfers have been substantially more costly than their non-urban counterparts, reflecting typically poorer stock condition at transfer. However, transfer HAs have tended to apply modernisation specifications superior to officially prescribed standards; 45 per cent have reportedly implemented local upgrade standards 'much higher' than the English 'Decent Homes Standard' or its Scottish and Welsh equivalents. Many transfer HAs have also generated procurement and other efficiency savings and ploughed them into enhanced modernisation specifications or originally unplanned works (e.g. environmental improvements).

Evolution of transfer business plans

The economic and housing market context for second generation stock transfers had mixed implications for the newly created housing associations concerned. Although many transfer HAs set up before 2004 benefited from falling interest rates through refinancing, the period covered by this study was also characterised by rapidly rising construction tender prices. In the decade to 2006, the tender price index for rehabilitation rose at three times the rate of retail prices.

Two-thirds of urban transfer HAs considered their original business plans to have been 'underfunded', compared with 36 per cent of second generation HAs involved in non-urban transfers. Typically, this was attributed to defective stock condition surveys. Exceptionally, Glasgow HA's 'underfunding' related to new-build development and, particularly, to the costs of second-stage transfers.

In reshaping business plans to accommodate higher than expected costs and/or income below that planned, the most commonly used approaches have been to sell assets and economise on staffing costs. A few landlords have resorted to reducing works specifications.

Governance and empowerment of tenants

The tendency to make transfers to newly established HAs, using a 'local housing company' model, continued during the second generation phase of the transfer programme. However, these HAs often considered wider constitutional changes towards the end of their 'transfer promises period' (typically five years). Innovations introduced at this stage might be inspired by aspirations to 'diversify the business'. Similarly, internal restructuring as 'promises periods' expire is resulting in some of these transfer landlords becoming subsidiary bodies within larger groups.

Transfer has provided a substantial stimulus to tenants' involvement, collectively and individually. The range of mechanisms developed by second generation transfer landlords to facilitate residents' influence on organisational governance and decision-making has been substantially wider than that existing prior to transfer. Likewise, the priority accorded to tenants' views has been significantly greater. Nevertheless, there is no survey evidence to support the belief that the broad mass of urban transfer HA tenants see their landlords as particularly open to residents' influence.

Organisational culture and management

Unlike first generation transfer HAs in market towns, suburban and rural areas, post-1997 transfer landlords in urban settings recognised the overhaul of organisational culture as a high priority objective from the start. Key aspirations included securing widespread staff commitment to HA goals, developing a more responsible and motivated workforce, and promoting a more business-aware, customer-focused ethos.

Junior staff generally confirmed that senior managers were more visible, accessible and approachable in second generation transfer HAs than in corresponding pre-transfer housing departments. Most of the new organisations have striven for a more inclusive, bottom-up culture that prioritises workforce consultation and encourages creativity by individual staff members. Inspiring managerial leadership tends to play a much more significant role in transfer HAs than in local authority housing departments.

As well as enhancing tenants' influence on organisational governance, for many senior managers in transfer HAs a critical aspiration on culture change has been a more customer-focused ethos. For the case study HAs, organisational practices seen as demonstrating this change included the introduction of repairs by appointment, extended office opening hours and choice-based lettings. While trade union membership rates have fallen slightly, union representatives were often closely involved in organisational decision-making and seen as trusted partners by transfer HA senior managers.

Transfer HA staff generally saw the new model of provision as having impacted positively on housing management services and on their working environment. In only one case study (of ten) was the overall message significantly more problematic. Staff generally perceived transfer HAs as more business-like, less political and more sensitive to commercial considerations. In general, workforce morale appeared to be relatively high, suggesting improved job satisfaction and motivation. There were signs, however, that this could be undermined by uncertainties around the end of the promises period, when organisations often faced the possibility of major restructuring.

Housing management

Statistical evidence shows strong performance improvement by second generation transfer HAs. Audit Commission inspection scores have highlighted post-1997 urban transfer landlords as among the highest-performing organisations in the sector. Among associations assessed by the Commission in the four years to 2007/08, 54 per cent were classed 'good or excellent'. Only 31 per cent of 'traditional' associations were similarly judged. In analysing their reforms of day-to-day service delivery, transfer HAs tended to highlight four key themes: a more customer-focused approach, a growing interest in neighbourhood management, a trend towards greater functional specialisation (e.g. designated rent arrears staff), and a 'more active' style of management.

Given the view that stock transfer represents a form of privatisation, the new landlords might be expected to adopt a 'hard-nosed' approach to housing management. This study confirms that transfer HAs have become more business-like and in some areas (e.g. dealing with antisocial behaviour and rent arrears) many have taken a 'firmer' stance than their local authority predecessors. Nevertheless, statistical evidence demonstrates that transfer HAs are, in fact, less likely to evict their tenants than local authorities or traditional housing associations.

Regeneration impacts

As well as enabling local authorities to meet official standards on stock condition and facilities, transfer can generate wider regeneration benefits. Increasingly, government guidance has required authorities' transfer plans to demonstrate how such benefits will be maximised. In terms of physical regeneration, most second generation transfer HAs (especially those in urban areas) cited significant investment in environmental improvements. Many have been involved in substantial programmes to demolish and replace transferred homes, also contributing to regeneration of the area. Actual levels of demolition and rebuilding have generally exceeded those anticipated at transfer. Hence these transfers could be said to be 'delivering added value'.

One of the strongest recurring themes in the research was the substantially greater levels of 'community regeneration' activity recorded by transfer HAs than originally anticipated. Many new HAs have become heavily involved in projects to promote education, employment and community development. After transfer they rapidly realised that their social purpose and commercial self-interest demanded active efforts to promote the social and economic renewal of their neighbourhoods.

Conclusion

In their own terms, second generation transfer HAs have mainly recorded strong successes in their first few years of operation. One key unanticipated outcome has been the extent of their involvement in community regeneration.

With most associations set up as transfer landlords continuing to exist as entities, it remains valid to speak of 'transfer HAs' and their 'traditional' counterparts. Over the medium and longer term, however, this distinction is likely to become less meaningful. As they mature further, some transfer HAs will morph into more diversified businesses or become absorbed within larger bodies, as they are likely to become increasingly attractive as partners in group structures or mergers. The challenge will be to retain and build on the dynamism and sense of purpose established in the initial phase after set-up. Both scenarios are also liable to result in diminished tenant representation at corporate level, though not necessarily a weakening of residents' influence on landlords' activities.

About the project

The research comprised an analysis of secondary data, a national survey of transfer promises and delivery, and case study work on ten transfer HAs. The bulk of the fieldwork was undertaken in England, but also included Scotland and Wales.

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The impacts of housing stock transfers in urban Britain

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The transfer of council estates into housing association (HA) ownership has transformed the structure of social housing provision across Britain; in half of English local authorities council housing is a thing of the past. From 1997, stock transfer extended beyond rural shire districts, with urban estates accounting for the majority of properties being handed to new social landlords.

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Katy Wright - 'Shameless stereotypes': the stigmatisation of social housing

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Katy Wright - 'Shameless stereotypes': the stigmatisation of social housing

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Katy Wright - Who has the right to live in social housing?

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Katy Wright - Who has the right to live in social housing?

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An archive article from the Daily Mail looking at the controversy stirred up around Bob Crow (now deceased Union leader) and his right to continue to live in a council house

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RMT general secretary lives with family in taxpayer-subsidised housing

Claimed he is being 'victimised' over his arrangements in radio interview

'I was born in a council house so I will die in one', he said

Union firebrand Bob Crow has said he has 'no moral duty' to move out of his council house - despite earning £145,000 in salary and expenses.

The general secretary of the rail union RMT still lives with his family in taxpayer-subsidised social housing even though millions of much more needy people are stuck on waiting lists.

Challenged in a radio interview about his failure to buy his own home, he claimed he was being 'victimised' and denied there was any ethical obligation for him to do so.

'I have no moral duty at all,' he said. 'I was born in a council house, as far as I'm concerned I will die in one.'

Mr Crow, 52, spoke on the day that he revealed his union could strike for a whole working week in response to plans by Transport for London to close ticket offices across the Tube network, with the loss of 750 jobs.

He appeared on London's LBC radio sporting a tan just after returning from holiday.

Presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer challenged the union boss about why he was still living in a housing association home in North London, when he was on such a high wage.

She suggested that if he moved out, the home could be used for a family on a waiting list for social housing who might currently be living in overcrowded accommodation. Mr Crow said that if he did move out into a private home, it would be unfair on his family.

'Yes I could buy my own place but why don't you ask the rest of my family who live at home with me whether they should have to move as well?' he said.

'Why is it just down to me to buy a house? Why should my family who have lived there for 30 years, with all the friends they've got, have to move because of the job I've got?' The RMT leader suggested that if he did move he would be seen as having deserted his working class roots.

'If I moved out of my house tomorrow the first thing you'd say is Comrade Crow leaves his roots,' he said.

'It's an absolute nonsense. I'm the only one down my road who pays their rent and I'm being victimised.'

He said it did not say anywhere in the rules that 'someone who pays their rent every week, doesn't claim social security' should have to give up their council home. Mr Crow said the reason behind the shortage of social housing was not because of people like him, but because of Margaret Thatcher's policy of right to buy, which allowed council housing tenants to buy their own homes.

But a ban on councils building their own homes meant that these were never replenished - causing a shortage.

He also denied he was the recipient of 'subsidised rent', even though his rent will be much less than the market rents for similar properties in his area.

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Why should I move out of my council house asks £145,000 union boss Bob Crow: Union firebrand says he has 'no moral duty to leave despite generous salary'

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RMT general secretary lives with family in taxpayer-subsidised housing Claimed he is being 'victimised' over his arrangements in radio interview 'I was born in a council house so I will die in one', he said Union firebrand Bob Crow has said he has 'no moral duty' to move out of his council house - despite earning £145,000 in salary and expenses.

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Katy Wright - Stories from Seacroft Estate (Leeds)

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Katy Wright - Stories from Seacroft Estate (Leeds)

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Housing estates have been an integral part of British life for decades.
Many were built in the years after World War II to provide a better standard of living for millions of people. Some estates are success stories but others are among the most deprived places in the UK.

The Seacroft estate in Leeds was begun in the post-War years. It has continued to expand and around 18,000 people now live there. Part of it is judged to be within England's 10% most deprived locations.

Over the past two months, the BBC's Nicola Pearson has been spending time with people who live and work in Seacroft. These are some of their stories.

To view the interactive content on this page you need Javascript enabled and Flash player installed. Download Flash here

The school

Seacroft's new secondary school is the David Young Community Academy.
Some of its pupils come from deprived backgrounds, but principal Ros McMullen has high ambitions for every child.

The businessman

Philip Stead runs the butcher's shop in Seacroft. He says he's seen a drop in trade as homes fall into disrepair and people move out of the area.

High-rise living

Pensioner Dorothy Wall has lived in one of Seacroft's high-rise blocks for 25 years. She is fiercely proud of the estate and its community spirit.

Growing up

Many young people on the estate complain there isn't much to do.
Youth workers Claire Billingham and Ian Wigglesworth run projects aimed at getting local teenagers off the streets at night.

Working men's club

The Seacroft Working Men's Club has 4,000 members. It is busiest on Friday and Saturday nights when people go to drink, socialise, play bingo and watch local acts perform.

The family

Gina Morrison lives with her husband and four children in a three-bedroom house. It angers her when people refer to where she lives as a "sink estate".

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Housing estates have been an integral part of British life for decades. Many were built in the years after World War II to provide a better standard of living for millions of people. Some estates are success stories but others are among the most deprived places in the UK.

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How the Government’s new vacant building credit affects social housing

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Housing developers in the UK could gain hundreds of millions of pounds in windfall profits under a new policy that lets them reduce contributions to building affordable housing or even avoid paying altogether, a council has claimed.

Since December, the government has exempted anyone who turns an empty building into private housing from paying for further affordable units, even if they could do so and still make healthy profits.

Among the first super-rich investors to have benefited from the change are the redevelopers of a luxury Mayfair apartment block in central London bought in 2013 by Abu Dhabi's investment fund. Planners fear Qatar's ruling family could be next to gain if their agents seek a multimillion-pound cut in the affordable housing bill on a £3bn redevelopment of Chelsea barracks.

A senior official at Westminster city council, a Conservative-led borough, has described the government's new vacant building credit as insane and estimated it could lose as much as £1bn in housing payments, deepening the accommodation crisis afflicting the poorest people.

Many other councils also face losing large amounts of affordable housing, officials said. The independent directly elected mayor of Bristol, George Ferguson, said the policy will make it even harder to build enough cheap housing in cities outside London such as his own, where property prices have risen rapidly.

James Murray, executive member for housing at the London borough of Islington, said: "The real impact of this is to increase landowners' and developers' profits at the expense of the affordable housing we desperately need." He said he would resist the policy.

The alarm over the rule change was sounded by John Walker, director of planning at Westminster, who described it as "a government gift [to developers]". He told the Guardian it has "sent shockwaves across all the boroughs".

"There will be some sites where we get absolutely nothing," he said. "On a forthcoming scheme we agreed that £9.1m was viable and we would lose all of that as a result of the vacant building credit. On just three schemes we consented [in a planning meeting] on 13 January we lost £29m. It is insane."

Last month the developers of an apartment scheme backed by the Abu Dhabi Investment Council used the system to cut their contribution to affordable housing in the borough by £9m, even though Westminster said the developers had already agreed their project would be profitable if they donated £17.9m. The scheme at 20 Grosvenor Square features palatial 5,000 sq ft apartments, with cinemas and billiard rooms, that are five times larger than the average new British home.

Brandon Lewis, the Conservative housing minister, claims the policy removes "a stealth tax" that hindered regeneration and encouraged empty properties. Emma Reynolds, the Labour shadow housing spokesman, said the government's behaviour was shameful.

Gushing money over property developers doesn't increase the rate of housebuilding, it simply increases the price of land

Alex Hilton, Generation Rent

"This is yet another example of the government giving developers an opt-out from providing affordable housing," Reynolds said. "This government has consistently and repeatedly watered down affordable housing requirements, depriving local communities of badly needed affordable homes."

The exemption does not require any minimum length of time that a property should be empty, sparking fears it could increase the number of empty buildings as owners flush out tenants before applying for permission to redevelop in order to benefit from the credit. Other planning experts have said that in towns and cities where property values have not grown as fast as London, it could help bring redundant buildings back into use as much-needed homes.

Alex Hilton, director of the pressure group Generation Rent, said the policy showed the government "ripping away at the number one funder of affordable housing in this country".

"Gushing money over property developers doesn't increase the rate of housebuilding, it simply increases the price of land," he said. "Exempting them from paying for affordable housing is a heavy blow to the number of new genuinely affordable homes."

Westminster is worried other developers, including Qatari Diar, the Qatar-owned developer that had agreed to build 123 affordable homes and make a £78m contribution as part of its deal to redevelop Chelsea barracks, could now reapply and seek to reduce its affordable housing obligation.

The Department for Communities and Local Government introduced the exemption in December when it also allowed anyone building fewer than 10 homes to avoid making a contribution to affordable housing. The idea is to increase the supply of housing.

"It was crazy to be levying a tax on empty and redundant buildings being brought into productive use," Lewis said in a statement. "Such stealth taxes hindered regeneration and encouraged more empty properties. Our changes will help deliver more housing at no cost to the taxpayer in both London and across England. This is part of a package of measures by the government to reduce the number of empty buildings across the country, which is good for both the environment and for society."

Great Marlborough Estates is planning 80 homes near Regent's Park and is expected to pay £18.7m in affordable housing contribution. Westminster said the council now expects to lose more than £10m of that.

"This is a new policy and we are seeking clarification of what it means," said Dean Clifford, a director at Great Marlborough. He said the level of affordable housing is already negotiated on the basis of how it affects the economic viability of the scheme.
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Property developers allowed to reduce affordable housing commitments

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Housing developers in the UK could gain hundreds of millions of pounds in windfall profits under a new policy that lets them reduce contributions to building affordable housing or even avoid paying altogether, a council has claimed.

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The new council housing & @UnityHomes affordable housing is coming along in Holbeck. Lots more to do but gd progress http://t.co/ornCH6fJii

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The new council housing & @UnityHomes affordable housing is coming along in Holbeck. Lots more to do but gd progress http://t.co/ornCH6fJii

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Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.

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The new council housing & @UnityHomes affordable housing is coming along in Holbeck. Lots more to do but gd progress pic.twitter.com/ornCH6fJii
— Adam Ogilvie (@AdamPOgilvie) February 21, 2015

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The new council housing & @UnityHomes affordable housing is coming along in Holbeck. Lots more to do but gd progress http://t.co/ornCH6fJii

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The new council housing & @UnityHomes affordable housing is coming along in Holbeck. Lots more to do but gd progress http://t.co/ornCH6fJii

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The new council housing & @UnityHomes affordable housing is coming along in Holbeck. Lots more to do but gd progress http://t.co/ornCH6fJii

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Why we need Social Housing

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Shelter campaigns to tackle the root causes of the housing crisis. Find out what the housing crisis looks like where you live.

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Privatisation of Social Housing

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The fundamental problem with the privatisation of public services is that, once they're gone, they're gone. They are no longer under the control of our elected representatives. The result is a hollowing out of democracy, where actual power shrinks to a tight core at the centre and government loses control of some of the most essential services and structures in our society, so that elections makes less and less difference to citizens and their wellbeing.

You'd think that's the Conservative party, keen as it is to shrink the state, would understand that. But the latest hair-brained pre-election housing policy emanating from the mouth of work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith seems to belie a fundamental misunderstanding of that fact.

Duncan Smith's plan to "gift" social housing to unemployed tenants who find a job is unworkable for so many reasons, not least because the majority of people of working age who live in social housing and who can work, already do. That aside, the killer blow to his idea is that it forgets that most social housing is not the state's to give away.

In transferring council homes to housing associations in the 1990s and beyond, the responsibility and the rights to those properties were lost by the state. By 2011, housing associations were collectively worth more than £100bn.

Housing associations receive funding from government to develop new homes, but those homes are neither owned by the state nor can they be manipulated to do the state's work. Government chose to shed risk, and it lost reward. IDS might like the idea of handing it over to tenants he deems deserving, creating an (albeit small) generation of grateful homeowners, but his ideas have no legal basis.

For years the Conservatives, and even some factions within Labour, have toyed with the idea of extending the right-to-buy to housing association properties. This may seem desirable because it removes inequalities between social tenants. However, the right-to-buy, just like the great IDS giveaway, requires the ability to be able to take a choice over slashing costs for tenants. Most housing associations are charities, legally obliged to secure a full return on their assets to serve their beneficiaries, and all developing organisations are leveraged up to the hilt having borrowed against the homes they have in an attempt to build desperately-needed new ones.

Housing associations are independent, commercial entities. The argument that, like the banks, they have become "too big to fail" (and are therefore always within arm's reach of the state) is laughable, because there's always another association willing to pick up the pieces by merger or acquisition. It's impossible to imagine a situation where central or local government would be forced to take a housing association's stock back in house. It didn't happen in Glasgow when the largest state-driven housing transfer project began to fall apart, so it's implausible now.

Whether or not you think handing out homes to tenants apropos of pure luck is a good idea, IDS seems to have understood the paradox of privatisation and accepted that retaining control of essential assets that affect our shared future is sensible.

To offer any kind of guiding hand on the role that housing plays, government must now make a fundamental change to its approach: it should label housing as a form of infrastructure.

In this regard, Britain is a European anachronism. Most of our neighbouring countries accept that housing is so closely linked to economic performance that it is in fact a form of infrastructure. Taking this leap - which would involve committing to planning and funding housing programmes spanning three decades or longer - would not banish the spectre of privatisation (think on the fate of our railways). But it might mean that, when it come to taking a decision - whether or not we approve of the outcome - our elected representatives won't remain impotent.

for your free Guardian Housing network newsletter with news and analysis sent direct to you every Friday. Follow us: @GuardianHousing
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Social housing is no longer yours to give away, Iain Duncan Smith

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The fundamental problem with the privatisation of public services is that, once they're gone, they're gone. They are no longer under the control of our elected representatives.

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Iain Duncan Smith 'gifting' of social housing - yet more privatisation and social control

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Oh, Iain Duncan Smith. Is there any other individual, anywhere in politics, who has such a talent for looking thoughtfully at a problem, giving it long consideration, and then coming up with a solution that is quite so catastrophically wrong?

Today the Times splashed on a story outlining the exciting new idea that IDS is pushing to include in this year's Tory manifesto. It would boost home ownership, incentivise people to move from welfare to work, and make working class voters less likely to defect to UKIP. The party's leadership is said to be smiling on the plan. Here it is in a sentence:

Free council houses for recent benefit claimants.

Millions of houses would be "given away" to low-paid workers under Tory plans to reward people who come off benefits.

Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, is pushing for a pledge to "gift" tenants their council home after a year in work to be included in the Tory manifesto.

If this doesn't immediately leap out at you as a good idea, that's because it's not. It's awful. How is it awful? Let me count the ways.

1) It misunderstands the reason people are out of work.

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that there are people who don't claim unemployment benefit because they can't find a job, but do so instead as an economically rational choice; people who have decided that their time is worth more to them then the wages available. These are the people who might be open to a great big house-shaped bribe to get back into work.

How many of these people do you imagine there are? And can it really be a large enough number to justify the fact that . . .

2) It eats yet further into Britain's scarce social housing stock

There are 1.7m people on the waiting list for social housing - people who would like one of these homes but can't get one.

This policy does nothing for them. No, that's not fair, it actually makes their situation worse, because it means there will be less social housing available to go round. Well done there.

What's more . . .

3) It loses the taxpayer money

. . . for the very simple reason that, if you give away some sweets, then those are some sweets that you no longer have.

Iain Duncan Smith seems to think the reduction in housing benefit would help a bit to offset the cost of this scheme. And there is talk of a clawback: sell your free house within three years, you'll pay 35 per cent of the proceeds in tax, that sort of thing. But the policy seems to assume the tax will fall as a proportion of sale price over time, and, anyway, that money won't be available for years. It's almost certainly a net loss to the state.

Worst of all, a fairly hefty contributor to high house prices is high land prices, which pushes up the price of building replacement housing, too. So that 35 per cent clawback is extremely unlikely to be enough to fund replacement housing. And since the reason we have a housing crisis is that we don't have enough houses, handing them out as electoral bribes is probably not a very good policy.

That's assuming that the bribery would work of course, which . .

4) It's politically suicidal

. . . it won't. Approximately 17 per cent of households in England and Wales live in social housing; that's around 4.1m of them. That, in the most optimistic assessment, is the maximum proportion of households who would stand to benefit from this policy.

Now consider how many people would instead be outraged by IDS's plan. They include those in private rented accommodation, many of whom have been saving for years but can't get on the ladder; anyone sitting on a vast mortgage; and anyone who's drunk the Daily Mail kool-aid, and who now thinks that benefit claimants and social housing residents get a far too cushy time already.

I wouldn't want to hazard a guess of how many people there are on this second list. But since there are 4.2m households in the private rental sector alone, I think we can safely say it's more than on the first list.

5) The government doesn't own many of these homes in the first place

Nearly half of them (1.9m) are instead owned by housing associations. These are charities, whose mission is to provide homes. Many of them have borrowed a fortune to build homes to help them fulfil this mission.

Even assuming that the government can force these charities to hand their assets out to their tenants, many will then be left with enormous holes in their balance sheets. So that will make building the homes Britain needs a whole lot harder, too.

***

Need I go on? This policy is economically, financially, politically and institutionally illiterate, and it'll make the housing crisis worse. So why the enthusiasm from the Tory front bench?

The answer, I suspect, can be found in the other policy currently under consideration: an extension of the right to buy to housing association stock. That also runs headlong into point five above, but it also shows quite how badly the Conservative leadership is still trying to relive the 1980s.

The party wants to increase home ownership, which is lovely of them. But they seem to think that the main the barrier to doing so is an over-mighty social housing sector. Break that, the argument goes, and you get more home owners and more Tories. After all, it worked for Margaret Thatcher.

But it won't work now - because the real reason home ownership rates are falling is rising house prices, and the main force behind that is we are not building enough houses in the places people want to live.

Yet the Tory party remains oblivious to this. Instead, it's shuffling assets around, ignoring the fact its policies will contribute directly to the decline of home ownership, and probably a concomitant decline in the number of potential Tory voters, too.

The Conservatives were once the natural party of government. Today they're a pale Margaret Thatcher tribute act, constitutionally incapable of examining why they can't get a thumping great majority any more.

And Iain Duncan Smith is setting housing policy. God help us all.

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So Iain Duncan Smith is setting housing policy now? God help us all

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Oh, Iain Duncan Smith. Is there any other individual, anywhere in politics, who has such a talent for looking thoughtfully at a problem, giving it long consideration, and then coming up with a solution that is quite so catastrophically wrong?

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ONS information on Homeownership and renting in the UK

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Home ownership and renting in England and Wales - Detailed Characteristics - ONS

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In 2011, there were 23.4 million households in England and Wales. The majority, 15 million (64 per cent) were owner occupied, bought either outright or through a mortgage. The remaining 8.3 million (36 per cent) were rented, either privately from a landlord or letting agency, or from a social landlord such as local authorities, housing associations, housing co-operatives or charitable trusts.

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The declining standard

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Housing in the run up to the Election - discussion from Class

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Election 2015: What's at stake for housing? | Publications | CLASS

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This guide outlines the state of the housing crisis, with rents rocketing in the private sector, social housing waiting lists rapidly rising, the impact of Coalition welfare reforms and a failure to build enough affordable homes.

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Six arrested as police help in evictions from Aylesbury estate in Southwark, London.

Interesting to compare the occupiers blog here - https://fightfortheaylesbury.wordpress.com/about/ - with Southwark council's plan - http://www.southwark.gov.uk/info/200179/aylesbury_estate

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Six arrests were made during a major police operation to support the eviction of protesters from a London housing estate which has become a rallying point for campaigners opposing controversial regeneration schemes.

A standoff following scuffles late on Tuesday at the Aylesbury Estate, which is being cleared for demolition before a £1.5bn regeneration project, after the local council moved to evict a group who took over part of the estate following a March for Homes protest in London earlier this month.

Notting Hill Housing was named last year as the development partner for a 20-year regeneration scheme to build 4,000 homes.

Taking inspiration from recent housing campaigns such as Focus E15 and New Era, the people involved in the the occupation at the Aylesbury had mounted a last-ditch legal bid to challenge their eviction by Southwark council.

Speaking at the scene shortly after the eviction on Tuesday night, activist Charlie Ebert accused the police of heavy handedness and said the estate had become synonymous with a London housing shortage affecting the poor.

"What's going on here is effectively social cleansing to make London a nice 'clean' place for the rich," he said. "A group of us wanted to stand in the way of that so we took over some of the flats as an act of solidarity."

Ben Quinn (@BenQuinn75)
Scene after eviction of housing activists at Aylesbury Estate, London https://t.co/mmYtN93BXm

Southwark council, which described those who occupied the properties as squatters who did not represent the residents, argues that it is tackling the housing crisis and says it has built more affordable homes than any other borough in the past three years.

Mark Williams, cabinet member for regeneration, planning and transport at Southwark council, said on Wednesday morning: "These squatters ... are risking the delivery of the very homes they claim to be campaigning for, for the people they claim to be campaigning for.

"Southwark is working hard to tackle the London-wide housing crisis and in the last three years we have built more affordable homes than any other London borough, and we have started building the first of our 11,000 new council homes. However, this is a London-wide issue and others must also play their part to provide the homes Londoners so desperately need."

The Metropolitan police said officers attended the estate to support Southwark council in ensuring that a court order granted by Lambeth county court ordering the premises to be vacated was adhered to.

A spokesperson added: "A number of people voluntarily left the premises; some did not. Six people were arrested for a variety of criminal offences."

Activists later said that they were continuing to occupying another part of the estate.

Guy Smallman, a freelance photojournalist, tweeted:

Guy Smallman (@GuySmallman)
Pictures: #TSG evict @Fight4Aylesbury occupation tonight. #HousingAction #Housing #aylesburyestate pic.twitter.com/fibMXSY65b

One of London's largest, the estate was the setting for Tony Blair's first speech as prime minister in 1997. Appearing on one of its characteristic concrete walkways, he pledged to deliver people "forgotten by government," including its 7,500 residents, from the urban decay he had chosen the estate to represent.

However, residents voted in 2001 by a large majority against the transfer of its council stock to a housing association, scuppering redevelopment attempts to create a more "economically mixed" community.

Some residents have long resented the estate's starring role in a Channel 4 ident in which flying concrete pieces come together to form the number four.
For mobile users: view the Channel 4 ident here Topics

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Six arrested as police help in evictions from London estate

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Six arrests were made during a major police operation to support the eviction of protesters from a London housing estate which has become a rallying point for campaigners opposing controversial regeneration schemes.

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Repossession and eviction hotspots.

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Shelter campaigns to tackle the root causes of the housing crisis. Find out what the housing crisis looks like where you live.

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"Rogue landlords: What is it like to live in a substandard home?"

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Unscrupulous landlords are providing vulnerable tenants with substandard housing, and getting away with it, according to experts who are demanding that minimum standards be enforced to drive rogue landlords out of the market.

The Chartered Institute of Housing - which represents housing professionals - and the Resolution Foundation - which campaigns for better living standards for people on low and modest incomes - say in a joint report that the rapid increase in property prices has left more people relying on private landlords.

The report says that one in three privately rented properties fails to meet the government's standards for a "decent" home - but what is like for those tenants who find themselves living in such a place.

Ron Bower, who is in his 60s and has recently suffered heart attacks and a mini-stroke, feels trapped in inadequate housing.

He is one of six adults sharing what would originally have been a two-bedroomed house in east London.

The house, condemned by the local council as "insanitary and unsafe", has been infested with mice, cockroaches and bed bugs.

"It's a terrible place to live," says Mr Bower, "It's shabby, it's dirty, it's too small. If you're number six waiting to get into the bathroom... you can imagine."

Minimum standards

He looks round the bedsit that contains all his possessions - with its fridge in the corner, oxygen mask by the bed and plastic bag of medicines on the window sill.

"You are stuck in your room, it's like a prison cell", he says, "but I couldn't ever invite anyone round. It's embarrassing."

Put simply, it's greed and exploitation
Ian Dick, Newham Council's housing department

The report calls for the creation of a single, easily understood, set of statutory minimum standards that landlords have to meet, and sufficient resources for enforcing them.

Grainia Long, the chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Housing, says: "These are people's homes we're talking about. I want to see a situation where all landlords understand their obligations, meet their obligations, and are committed to professional standards."

Mr Bower is among those vulnerable tenants the Chartered Institute of Housing and the Resolution Foundation want to help.

Fees

He lost his job as a lorry driver when he had a heart attack, and has little money to spare for rent.

He describes being in the house as "existing" rather than "living".

"I can't get a deposit together [for a house] to move out so I've got to stay here," he says. "I don't want to, but what can I do?"

People often have to find a significant sum to get tenancies in decent accommodation - to pay the fees charged by some letting agents.

The report calls for letting agents to be regulated in the same way as estate agents are, and for an end to the practice of charging fees to tenants.

'No alternative'

Newham Council, in whose area Mr Bower lives, has pioneered a system of compulsory registration of landlords, partly so it can track down those properties it describes as "slums".

Ian Dick, of the council's housing department, says for many tenants there is a stark choice - between very poor housing or life on the streets.

"We have a big problem with homelessness," he says. "Therefore tenants are forced into living in this kind of poor quality housing. They don't have any alternative."

Newham has prosecuted 500 landlords, tackling those who flout health and safety standards, in the past 18 months.

"Put simply, it's greed and exploitation. Landlords are making a killing without doing anything for tenants," says Mr Dick.

Tax relief

But as well as acting against exploitative landlords who let their properties deteriorate, the Chartered Institute of Housing and the Resolution Foundation want new incentives to others to improve the accommodation they're offering.

Landlords can currently claim tax relief on the money they spend repairing and maintaining their houses and flats - the report suggests that landlords who join a recognised accreditation scheme should get similar concessions for making some physical improvements to them.

Richard Blanco, of the National Landlords' Association, welcomed the proposal.

"Landlords run businesses and anything that encourages us to reinvest our profits or improve our properties is to be welcomed."

Mr Blanco said the association would also welcome a hard line against exploitative landlords.

"Rogue landlords ruin our reputation, and we want to drive them out," he says.

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Unscrupulous landlords are providing vulnerable tenants with substandard housing, and getting away with it, according to experts who are demanding that minimum standards be enforced to drive rogue landlords out of the market.

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A brief history on council housing in the UK;

http://fet.uwe.ac.uk/conweb/house_ages/council_housing/print.htm

and a BBC Documentry about the rise and fall of them.

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The Great Estate - The Rise and Fall of the Council House.

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A documentary about social housing in the U.K. First Broadcast in August 2011. Copyright BBC-TV